Perspective...

I think it is time for some Perspective here on the forum.

Eveyone is allowed their own opinion. For what it is worth, here's mine!

After the launch of Blitz 2D, Blitz 3D was higly anticipated for over a year and a half. It arrived only slightly late as I recall because Mark is a stickler for stability and quality of product.

Mark continues to support the 2D product even now. He has since then, also launched the 3D product and BlitzPlus, not to mention Maplet. Four products all being supported and he is now developing the fifth, BlitzMax.

(I'd like a show of hands please, how many of you have developed or launched 5 commercial products in 3 years, maintained a one to one on-line support service, delivered stable updates for each product and continued to develop new products at the same time)?

Hmm not many!

Other than you GFK! (lol)

Here is my point...

Mark is a highly focussed, busy chap who needs support and constructive crticism, not negativity.

CONSTRUCTIVE - so he can build on what is a strong product base.

I would like to ask the community to think about the long term aspects of Blitz and the associated products, not the instant/quick gratification.

Think about this..

Mark is the reason we are all here on the forum right now, that's a good thing - right?

Mark is NOT a God, he's a man, a very talented one at that.

So, what about the recent update issue? Length of time between updates? I think when only two products needed supoort we had it good, now there's still only Mark but there are more products, it is unreasonable for us to expect more in the same period of time.

We were promised cubemapping - and it is in there isn't it? That's what almost everyone wanted once they'd seen 'Robs' demo - well now we have it! As promised - delivered.

The other stuff in the update is additional and useful. What else did everyone expect?

*****

Talking about Blitz as a dead product does not constructively advance Blitz, it simply distracts people from the truth, especially those who are new to Blitz and new to the forums.

Blitz is far from 'dead' or 'dying' in fact it's having a great life - you don't have to look far to see it, but when everyone's pointing at the floor and looking down instead of straightforward they're bound to miss it.

Look ahead - that's the only way to SEE where your journey is taking you, and don't miss the sights on the way! That way you'll have a better perspective on what is before you!

Enjoy your journey - don't squander it.

Enough - I have had my say.

Regards,

IPete2.

*applauds*

Agree!

It was to do with a question mark hanging over the legalities of having MD2 support, if i remember correctly....?
I've also noticed that even when people DO get what they ask for, if they aren't moaning about it, they're instantly moaning about [the lack of] some other feature they didn't even know existed until they heard about it in an interview with some technical bod from iD software.

People who are constantly waiting for "the next big thing", might as well leave now, imho (although I'm no authority here - an opinion, is all) - because they'll never ever code anything.

I've also noticed some people's incredibly ability to over-react to circumstance - for instance, when Idigicon's website was down for a few days while it moved servers last year, the rumour-mongers were out in force and before you know it, Idigicon have gone bust (they haven't, but that's what people said in certain circles). The same thing happens every time Blitz updates are more than a month apart - you can put money on a spate of "Blitz3D Dead?!" or "No more updates?!" threads appearing more or less overnight. In fact, the only people who brand Blitz 'dead' are the ones who have never done anything worthwhile with it anyway, so why do they make such a fuss??

Even if Blitz3D never got another update, its far from dead. How can it be dead when its so usable? My copies of Blitz/Blitz3d have paid for themselves hundreds of times over. Even WITHOUT cubemapping! :)

If you think Blitz is dead (as of 1.85), reinstall version 1.64 - the first official release, and try using that for a couple of weeks. You'll be surprised at how much its evolved.

Yes, I agree.


Now, Blitz is a mature product so it's normal that there are less update. And there will be an new one with BlitzMax.

It's true that I'd like to have DX9, but I've already not enough time to explore all the possibilities of B3D, so I don't know if it will be a good thing to have DX9.

I saw 3Dmark with DX7 and wow it's still impressive. Blitz is still an excellent product. We can do beautiful thing with it, and have lot of fun. it's the essential.

I begin the programmation with B3D and now I love programmation. I learn a lot of thing with B3D and I have still lot of thing to learn.

I like the fact that Blitz3D is a mysterious product. Because I want to learn more about it. I like the fact that mark say few thing about the development of BlitzMax, because when it will be out I will certainly enjoy it.

So yes, blitz is not dead.

PS: excuse my bad english, please!! I'm french

don't worry tho, give this issue time and it'll start up again :( I totally agree with everything that has been said. I've been using blitz for about 3 years, and i'm no-where near knowing what it can really do. I LOVE BLITZ!!!!

Totally agree with IPete2!

I am fed up with all the moaning and complaining, and if I am fed up then Mark must be too!

There have been dozens of features added to Blitz3D since I purchased it and I'm not using half of them and certainly don't think I need any more to make fun games.

At the end of the day, if your game NEEDS bump mapping, "real" cel shading, vertex shaders or pixel shaders to work, then you don't have a game in the first place.

Cheers,

Ryan

Absolutely, I am nowhere near able to use things like bump-mapping, dot3 (wot?) or many of these nice functions, so I work hard with what I can do. The big commercial companies will ALWAYS be a step ahead, using the latest, most advanced functions and using little tricks etc., and we will always strive to mimic this.

Many of the more experienced Blitzers here are good at figuring out ways to achieve similar effects with the tools they have - largely due to a greater understanding, but also due to having the perseverance to put the effort in, rather than expect Mark to create the functionality specifically within Blitz.

These forums have shown me what is possible with Blitz, and I am extremely impressed. It is capable software, a lot just depends on how it is used.

Here's my perspective, for what it's worth:

If the only people who bought Blitz3D were people who finished what they started, Blitz3D would have sold maybe 10 copies and Mark would have made no money from it, gotten bored, and moved on. In fact, the folks who wanna mess around and make cool demos are clearly the vast majority of Blitz3D users, so I think it's kind of pointless to tell them to move on. If they were to move on, Blitz3D would not be a commercially viable product.

If a person who wants to dabble with high end 3D effects isn't able to get a thrill out of Blitz3D and chooses DarkBasic Professional, say, on the basis that it's got more gee whiz features, I don't see how it benefits us.

I think Blitz3D is a great product, but it still needs to keep up with the Joneses, if only because a serious project I start today probably isn't going to get to market for at least a year, by which time every PC sold in the last 12 months will have DX9 hardware and if I want to stand out from the crowd I'd like to support it.



Mark gave the reasons for the apparent lack of progress in a recent post -- he's been (a) caught up in politics, and (b) he's been largely working on stuff that will benefit all of the Blitz line of products (i.e. BlitzMax, BlitzPlus, and Blitz3D). This seems like a reasonable explanation, but this underlines the fact that an explanation was required... There has been an apparent lack of progress and it did need explaining.

One obvious explanation for the lack of DX9 support is that BlitzMax is supposedly going to be OpenGL-based. If this is the case, then writing DX9-specific code will delay BlitzMax, which is not in Mark's interest: he's probably not making much money off Blitz3D any more, because he doesn't charge for updates. BlitzMax, on the other hand, will make him a lot of money. This is why I think that he needs to charge for updates; it's probably too late to change the Blitz3D business model though.



3DMark 2001 uses DX7 features Blitz3D still doesn't support (e.g. bump maps). 3DMark 2001 SE uses first generation pixel and vertex shaders (DX8 stuff).



Indeed. If your game needs anything more than an ASCII display then you probably don't have a game. But you may have trouble selling your ASCII game to anyone.



You would be if Blitz supported them, because they should be no harder to support than any of the usual features of Blitz3D.

I would agree but im busy holding my breathe waiting for HRDI support with smooth skinning and realtime radiosity.

I surely hope he doesn't charge for updates... This is what makes blitz so cool... If you bought both blitz3d and blitzplus together it would still be less the MSVC++ Professional. Unfortunately I don't have 60 bucks right now to buy B+ to finish my 2D game in :-( But I have blitz3d and it's a great product. Anyways I apologized for my post, which really the purpose was, I kept seeing blitz+ updates but not blitz3d updates. So I asked a question in the forums. A couple of people replied and told me what other posts to look for that information for, so that was cool.

Anyways see my apology in filax's post about the french community (my post is allllll the way at the bottom, but there's an apology in it ;-)

If you bought a new copy of Blitz3D every year since 1999 for full price it would still be cheaper than the current MS dev tool set (Visual Studio .NET or whatever it's called). I don't think Blitz3D is going to price itself out of the market by charging, say, $25 for the occasional upgrade.



It's not really fair to compare wrapping DX9 API calls with implementing bleeding edge stuff DX9 doesn't give you for cheap.

$25? are you kidding? That's almost the price of full shareware games! Plus that means Mark is obligated to provide something worthy of 25 bucks... maybe you would pay it but I doubt alot of other people would.

Why is it that people still see vertex weighting as some super exotic technology when practically every game released on a pc or console uses them?? It's an entry level feature of any commercial 3d engine.

Don't get me wrong, I love using Blitz; but the lack of vertex weighting is a pretty major drawback. Personally, I could care less about Doom3 lighting, pixel shaders etc. - I just want to be able to skin a character properly!

-Pudding

>I think Blitz3D is a great product, but it still needs to
>keep up with the Joneses, if only because a serious
>project I start today probably isn't going to get to
>market for at least a year, by which time every PC sold in
>the last 12 months will have DX9 hardware and if I want to
>stand out from the crowd I'd like to support it.

Most PC's are sold to the value/mainstream market where Radeon 9200, Geforce4 MX, Geforce 4 TI, and GeforceFX 5200 and GeforceFX 5600 will be the prefered choice... The 3 first are DX8.1 parts, the fourth is adequate in DX8.1, but seriously slow in DX9, and the last is DX9 but is outperformed in some respects by the TI series... So my guess is that DX8.1 cards will still be selling well into the next year, while DX9 cards get cheaper.

Remember that the value/mainstream segments is 80% of the market.

Andy

Am I the only one who's completely fed up with this whole discussion?

Mark Sibly helped me to realise my dream - to create a medieval landscape and village with people walking around (and really feel like I'm there).
My lady is designing the terrain, paths and costumes, and says that it's the nearest she'll get to feeling like a god!

Stop quibbling, Mark Sibly's helping make our dreams come true.
Dark Basic - yeah I started on that a couple of years ago.
I just remeber the number of things it couldn't do....

Thanks Mark, if you need to charge for regular updates then DO it - I'll pay.

here here JB.